I’m writing four novels set more than 50,000 years apart. The distance between them is part of the point.
Entanglement of Ages looks at what changes as civilizations develop, and what doesn’t: power, identity, faith, ownership, discovery, and the impulse to decide what another life is worth.
All four books have beta manuscripts. I’m looking for readers and editors who can tell me where the stories work, where they don’t, and what I have missed. I’m also experimenting with how this fictional world could eventually move into illustration, graphic novels, and possibly video.
Four novels, deliberately out of chronological order
The intended reader order is:
- The Fatherless — c. 1 CE. An ancient republic, a child made to carry someone else’s blame, and institutions that decide who counts as a person.
- Neurion — 2150 CE. A machine intelligence begins to claim a self of its own. The familiar questions of personhood and ownership return in a new form.
- Age of Embers — c. 25,000 BCE. Cold, migration, and a frightening sky push people from survival toward observation and durable knowledge.
- The Age of Forms — c. 28,000 CE. Material abundance has not settled who belongs. The distant future carries old questions in unfamiliar forms.
The historical sequence is different: Age of Embers → The Fatherless → Neurion → The Age of Forms.
That is intentional. Sometimes readers meet the consequence of an event before they discover its origin. Each book must still work as a story in its own right; the connections should deepen the experience rather than require homework.
The dates are approximate settings within the fiction, not publication dates or historical claims.
Keeping the larger story honest
I use a narrative arc matrix to follow character development, historical events, recurring themes, and consequences across all four manuscripts.
It helps answer a practical editing question: does this chapter change something that matters, both here and in the wider series?
The matrix is useful because a reader’s sequence is not the world’s chronology. An event seen through one civilization may acquire a different meaning through another. But a matrix can tell me what I intended, not whether I actually made the connection convincing.
That is where independent readers are invaluable.
Where I hope to take the work
Prose is the foundation. Beyond it, I have a few exploratory directions:
- Illustrated fiction and graphic novels: character studies, locations, page compositions, and visual continuity across very different eras.
- Short-form video: storyboards, animated scenes, and cinematic prototypes to discover which parts of the writing translate well into motion.
- AI-assisted creative tools: concept exploration, storyboard iterations, continuity checks, and experiments with smaller-scale multimedia production.
As a software engineer, I’m interested in the tools as well as the stories. AI can help test ideas and lower the cost of experimentation, but it doesn’t decide whether a character feels real, whether a scene works, or whether an adaptation respects the story. Those remain editorial and artistic judgments.
These are development possibilities, not announced adaptations or release dates. My priority is to make the novels worth reading.
What would help most
I’m interested in developmental editing, attentive beta reading, and subject-matter perspectives: history, philosophy, science, technology, psychology, visual storytelling, and other fields the books touch.
The most useful feedback is specific:
- Where did your attention drift?
- Which decision felt implausible or unearned?
- What was confusing, especially across timelines?
- Did a theme grow naturally from the characters, or feel imposed?
- What stayed with you after reading?
Praise is welcome, but difficult questions are often more valuable. I know what I meant to put on the page. I need to learn what actually arrived there.
Interested in beta reading or editing? See the
reader and editor invitation.
It prepares a private email to [email protected].
Expressing interest doesn’t automatically provide manuscript access; reading
invitations are handled separately.
Already have a private beta edition? Use the
private review page or write to
[email protected]. The review page prepares an email; it does
not publish responses to the website. Please keep unpublished story material
and spoilers out of public discussions.
You can explore all four books and the creative adaptation possibilities.
I wrote about the personal and historical origins of the original Fatherless idea in an earlier post. That account is where the project began. This four-book series is where it has grown.